reyna

I started working from the book “How to draw what you see”.

There is something contradictory in what I’ve been taught as a child.
On the one hand I’m taught to go by my feelings. If something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.
But on the other hand I’ve also been taught that you should be able to explain why you do the things you do.
You either have to do what everybody does or you have to explain yourself. Not doing either will get you in trouble. In those case you’re told that you should just tough it out because your parents and teachers know what is best for you even if you feel it is not.
But of course not knowing that I was autistic I came about a lot of instances where I knew that something was wrong but I didn’t know why. Running into a brick wall I was told to just go on trying. Not succeeding in something meant that I didn’t put enough effort into it.
It could never mean that my feeling that something wasn’t right for me was right.

Amazon advised me to also buy “Drawing with the right side of the brain” when I wanted to buy “How to draw what you see” by Rudy de Reyna.
“How to draw…” is one of those books that assumes that people know how to look and see details and only concerns it self with teaching techniques to draw. (That contrary to “Drawing with the right side of the brain” that teaches you how to see details as a first step and drawing them as a second step.)

After my painful experience yesterday when I found that I run into problems with “drawing on the right side…” because I see more detail then is expected by the book I decided to go with my gut. Instead of working from a book that wants to teach me something I already know I should work from a book that teaches me things I don’t know.

Rudy de Reyna thinks that the world is composed of four basic shapes that can be seen in every thing you see around you: The cube, the cylinder, the cone and the sphere.
If you concentrate on these basic shapes you are half way through your drawing: A tree is an long cube with cubes attached, an ice cream cone is a cone with half a sphere on top.
Of course you’ll have to draw in details to get a tree or ice cream cone but the basic shape is there.

De Reyna starts of with a very basic assignment. So basic I have never thought of doing it. But in doing it I immediately saw the worth:
Drawing straight lines is something you’ll will have to do in every drawing you do.
And I have done some straight lines and every time I do I get annoyed by the fact that they either aren’t very straight or aren’t parallel to some other line I drawn.

In practicing straight lines I found a few things.

1. Contrary to what I believed drawing lines straight down isn’t the easiest method. For me it’s much easier to draw right to left. (I’m right handed)
2. Again contrary to what I believed. To draw a line parallel to an other line it’s easier when I draw the second line above the first line instead of below.
3. Drawing with speed is easier then drawing slowly.

That drawing a parallel line is easier when you can’t see the first line (because you’re covering it with your hand) really surprised me.
It turns out that when I can see the first line I’m so distracted by trying to make the two lines parallel that I forget to draw the line straight. When covering the first line with my hand I concentrate on where I want to end the second line. Then I just draw and the line gets much more straight.

Here is the exercise I did.
All the lines are drawn right to left and I turned the paper as needed.
Of course I have to do this exercise some more. All the lines in this exercise are in close proximity of each other were as in real drawing they tend to be further apart.
In this exercise I tried whether it would be easier to draw a line parallel to an other line while looking at that line or while covering that line. But in real drawings you some times don’t have that choice. You have a first line and need to draw a second were the drawing dictates.

Drawing straight lines exercise

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